A spokesperson for Akamai said that an outage of the company’s Prolexic DDoS services was the culprit that caused the wide-scale outage on Thursday afternoon for its customers.
The US-based service provider, which promotes itself as “the world’s largest and most sophisticated edge platform”, counts some of Australia’s biggest banks and airline systems among its clients.
In response to the issue, Prolexic noted that the disruption was not caused by a system update or a cyberattack. Instead, a routing table value used by its Prolexic DDoS services was “inadvertently exceeded,” the company explained.
“The effect was an unanticipated disruption of service,” the company said.
Issues took place at approximately 2:20pm AEST on Thursday. Akamai said it alerted impacted customers within seconds and managed to resolve the issue immediately.
The company said that the issue was limited to version 3.0 of its Routed service.
“The impact was limited to Akamai customers using version 3.0 of the Routed service,” the company confirmed in a post. “Many of the approximately 500 customers using this service were automatically rerouted, which restored operations within a few minutes. The large majority of the remaining customers manually rerouted shortly thereafter.”
Several banks and post offices in Australia experienced a technical issue that prevented some customers from transferring money. Among the affected companies were Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac, ANZ, Australia Post, and Virgin Australia.
At the time, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia said that it was investigating the issue and would provide an update soon.
“We’re aware some of you are experiencing difficulties accessing our services and we’re urgently investigating. We apologise and thanks for your patience, we’ll provide an update soon,” CBA said. Several other banks similarly apologized for the difficulties.
While Virgin Australia’s outage affected its website and contact center. And Australia Post immediately said it was due to an “external” outage.
Akamai has apologized to its customers and affected users. In response to the issue, the company has taken steps to prevent such incidents in the future. It also plans to make sure that its customers are set up for automatic rerouting.
“We have taken steps to prevent a recurrence of this issue. We will also be working to make sure that every Akamai customer is set up for automatic rerouting in the future,” the company said.
